Canadian music lovers rejoice! Spotify is coming to Canada

When it comes to music streaming, Spotify has quickly become a major player. With Spotify, you can look and choose from an extensive list of songs and can even get unlimited add-free music streaming for $9.99 a month – with the option to download your library for offline listening.

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Spotify has continued to evolve over the course of the years, adding improvements to its mobile apps and increasing its market presence to places like the U.S. along the way. The newest market for Spotify may soon be Canada, and even Asia and South America shortly after, at least according to recently published annual accounts from the company.

The reports say that the Canadian launch is already planned, though they also are considering expanding into other areas like Asia and South America. This falls in line with the fact that Spotify has already established subsidiaries in Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong, even though its service isn’t available in any of these markets.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any details about when Canadian consumers will get access to Spotify, but it seems likely that it will happen sometime before the year is up. As for the other markets mentioned, things are less clear with Spotify simply mentioning its desire to expand in the area. More than likely this expansion beyond Canada won’t occur until sometime in 2013. This is just a semi-educated guess, so take it with a grain of salt.

For those in a current market for Spotify, what do you think? Any Canadian readers interested in getting their hands on Spotify when it launches in their area?

When I first heard about Spotify I was super-excited but now that I have Google Music and it’s free and allows me to listen to the collection I already have I am not sure there is any need for Spotify. But if they would allow me to add in / upload my existing collection – I’d be all over it. I just don’t want to have 2 different collections in 2 different players.

Trevor Kramer

I’ll stick with Rdio. Much better UI and nothing to install. Which means that you can log in from almost anywhere on any browser and listen. Unlike Spotify which makes you download their software and listen through it.

IdiotAboveMe

RDIO has its advantages and disadvantages. I think in many cases it depends on what kind of music you’re into as I find RDIO is lacking on the licensing of less “mainstream” genres. I’ve been using Spotify via VPN for quite some time now and have also tried RDIO. The big advantage of Spotify in my mind is the fact that it’s not just a music collection, but also a “music platform”. Apps on the platform like ‘Soundrop’ and ‘We are Hunted’ are great for music discovery. They also just added a radio feature to mirror some of the functionality of Last.fm and RDIO. I probably sound like I work for Spotify but have really just been doing a lot of reasearch on various platforms since they announced their imminent entry into the Canadian market back in April at the CMDC Annual Conference. Cheers!

http://twitter.com/ddrucker David Drucker

Spotify is 1000 times better than Rdio. I’ve been waiting for Spotify for years now and it seems as if its been in every country except Canada. If this really is true, it will be a huge win for streaming media in a country with almost no good choices (No Pandora, no Hulu, no Amazon Streaming, a tiny catalog of Netflix, and so far, no Spotify).